Newspaper employee, in the perennial quest to polish his mediocre language. Roaming around Bangalore for the time being

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Texting thoughts, taxing thoughts

Festivals and greetings. Inseparable. Every special occasion brings a bevy of e-greetings and SMSes. This Vishu, I was a bit worried. Every greeting message was testing the memory limits of my 1100. What’s the big deal, delete old stuff, you’d say. There lies the problem. I love treasuring messages.

I got my phone as my father’s gift, close to Vishu three years ago. I was packing to go Bangalore for my internship. As I was leaving home on my own for the first time, my concerned parents deemed mobilephone as an unavoidable accessory to keep in touch and to boost my job-hunting.

Greetings for that year’s Vishu flowed in as my number went around the circle of family and friends. Handling a cellphone for the first time, I never bothered to delete any message. By the time I finished my three-week internship, my inbox was full. Then I decided to retain only greetings.

Three years and innumerable messages later, my mobilephone has been flashing ‘No space for new messages’ text increasingly these days. For the past one year, I had retained enough capacity for just one more fairly large message. And when the inflow goes past the limit, I start editing.

Usual ‘hi-hello’ and ad messages were deleted on the spot. Then there were some messages with no names. The senders had changed their numbers and I had deleted the old contact details, making the messages unrecognisable and easy prey for my deleting exercise.

Now, that chance is also becoming slim, but incoming messages are not. This Vishu, I had no choice but to cut ‘repeat texts’ sent by more than one contacts. Time to change the phone? Nah! My model was the simplest and the most user-friendly model available. This model has the habit of making its owners fall in love with it. I remember a colleague grieving online about replacing her 1100. Other than the limited memory for contacts and SMSes, my phone was as good as new. Sturdy and simple, it has braved many big falls from my hand.

It currently has 72 SMSes in its inbox, an insignificantly small number when compared to the high-end phones available at cheaper rates. The oldest one came three years back from Mathew during my internship days, warning about the ruckus in Bangalore after the death of Rajkumar.That was two days before Vishu. Will I be still treasuring my 1101 next Vishu? Let’s see.